The Final Storm (61 page)

“What do you suggest?”

“Arm the cannon on the plane, once it’s airborne, and clear of the island. If there’s an accident, the only … um … 
issue
will be how much dust is left of us. But … just us.”

Tibbets sat back again, could see the perfect logic in Parsons’s reasoning.

“Groves doesn’t like this idea?”

“Groves is listening to the physicists who insist it will be too difficult to insert the cordite into the bomb once the plane is in the air. Mind you, not one of those boys has ever flown in a B-29, most likely. All it involves is a little … maneuvering. Can’t say I’ve ever thought of being a contortionist, but that’s what I’ll have to do. Once we’re clear of the island, I’ll climb down into the bomb bay and insert both drums of explosives … on the fly, so to speak.”

“Have you tried doing that before now?”

“Paul, no one’s tried any of this
before now
. I’ll work on it on the ground, practice the technique. It has to be this way.”

“What about Groves?”

“He’ll need to be briefed, I understand that. But you make sure he’s briefed so close to takeoff, he won’t have time to respond.”

Tibbets tried to imagine the scene, Parsons sliding down into the bomb bay, perched on the bomb.

“You’ll have to sit on the damn thing.”

“Yep. Straddle it.”

“Like it’s a horse.”

“Or a torpedo. Done that a couple times in training. One thing about becoming an engineer, you get to do things most people think are completely nuts.”

Tibbets downed the bourbon, looked at Parsons, saw no smile, the man completely serious.

“This qualifies, Deak. But it’s your call.”

Parsons sipped at the bourbon, then downed it in one quick gulp. He shook his head, seemed to fight off the burn, said, “Ride ’em cowboy.”

T
he choice of target came from LeMay’s office. There had been considerable discussion between everyone who had the authority, communications between LeMay and Groves, Hap Arnold and George Marshall. The meetings had continued on both Tinian and Guam, the discussions involving LeMay and Tibbets, along with Parsons, Ferebee, and LeMay’s own high-ranking staff, including the much-humbled Butch Blanchard. The list of potential targets had been narrowed to three cities, but the final choice could only be made en route, once the weather conditions over each city were determined. Once Kyoto had been eliminated by
the president, the most favored site had become Hiroshima. There were several reasons, but Tibbets understood that militarily that city held a number of important targets, installations and barracks for Japanese troops, as well as a network of smaller factories and plants that continued to provide assistance to the Japanese war effort. But there was one more reason why Hiroshima seemed ideal. The city was situated in something of a valley, mountains framing one edge, so that the blast would be contained, and not allowed to dissipate over a wider, flatter area. Though no one was certain just what the bomb would do, the geography of the city suggested that the blast would be more compact, and thus more effective.

Once the bomb left the bomb bay, the electronic connections would be severed, the bomb then controlled by automatic systems Parsons would be monitoring. The switches that would fire the cannon had to engage while the bomb was still in the air. A ground-impact explosion was out of the question, primarily because the delicate mechanisms that controlled the inner workings of the bomb would be shattered to rubble, making the entire system unpredictable. In the many tests and studies, the various calculations made by mathematicians and physicists, it had been decided that the bomb would be programmed to explode at an altitude of 1,890 feet. At that altitude, the explosion, if it occurred at all, would spread out in a pattern that would cause a wider devastation zone over the heart of the city. Certainly, detonating the bomb at such a precise altitude was an engineering feat all its own, but there was one nagging problem that had plagued the test runs of various dummy bombs from the first training exercises over Utah. No matter the expertise of the men like Parsons, the proximity fuse that would determine exactly when the bomb exploded had been notorious for its failures. During test runs, two of the electronic fuses had ignited immediately after the bomb left the bomb bay, an unnerving experience for a flight crew even with a bomb weighted with concrete and charged with nothing more than TNT. Occasionally the fuse had failed altogether, the dummy bombs never exploding at all. That was certainly better for the crew, but far worse for the entire mission, the “pumpkins” of TNT impacting the Utah desert without any ignition at all. Once the test runs began out of Tinian, the bugs with the proximity fuses seemed to work themselves out. That gave great comfort to the engineers, especially Parsons. But the crews knew that a failure on a training run was a frustrating annoyance. If the fuse failed during the actual mission, the threat to the crew would be a minor problem, compared with the collapse of the entire program.
Keeping the Manhattan Project secret would become much more difficult if the Japanese suddenly had pieces of some strange new device littered about the streets of Hiroshima.

In studying the aerial photos of Hiroshima, Tibbets and his bombardier, Tom Ferebee, had noticed a peculiar landmark at the city center, a T-shaped bridge that would be clearly visible at even the highest altitudes. For a bombardier, it was a perfect AP:
Aiming Point
. As long as the skies were relatively clear, everyone involved in the decision agreed that Hiroshima was the primary target, and now Tom Ferebee, the man who would guide the plane into position for their sole opportunity for a successful strike, knew exactly what to look for.

T
he strike plane for the mission had come from the Martin assembly plant in Omaha, Nebraska. It was a natural decision, based on the problems of airworthiness of so many of the heavily used B-29s, that the primary aircraft chosen for this unique mission would be brand-new, well tested, and would be handpicked by the man who would fly her. Tibbets had gone to Omaha himself, touring the assembly plant, learning more about the nuts-and-bolts construction of the planes than he had ever thought possible. Once his choice had been made, Tibbets had left the job of ferrying the new plane to his co-pilot, Captain Bob Lewis. While Tibbets continued with his various jaunts between Los Alamos, Utah, and Washington, Lewis had piloted the new plane to its training bases, first to Wendover, then on to Tinian. With a myriad of details to occupy every moment of his day, Tibbets had not paid any attention to rumblings from Lewis that Lewis actually expected to fly the primary mission himself. Tibbets was, after all, the man in charge, in command of several crews, all of whom had a specific part of the mission. From plotting the routes of weather observers to putting rescue planes in position, Tibbets had embraced every part of the operation. This planted the notion in Lewis’s mind that Tibbets would remain on Tinian as the chief administrator, while Lewis, who had flown the specially equipped B-29 on many practice runs, would actually drop the atomic bomb. It was only when the plane had been given a name, with no input from Lewis, that the controversy had come to a head. For Tibbets it was one more piece of the aggravation trying to keep the cap on the psyches of men who had endured an astonishing amount of stress, training for a mission whose details they did not fully
understand. Tibbets set Lewis straight. Bob Lewis would co-pilot the plane, with Tibbets in the pilot’s seat.

Throughout the training, the strike plane had undergone modifications that most pilots who flew the big bombers would have found strange, if not completely unnerving. Tibbets himself had observed that a plane without machine guns maneuvered with far more dexterity and could actually reach an altitude nearly four thousand feet higher than a typically armed bomber. The strike plane thus would carry only a pair of fifty calibers in its tail. In addition, there was a panel of electronic switches and gauges installed in proximity to the bomb bay itself, separate from the usual radio and navigational panels. The strange configuration included heavy electrical cables that fed from the panel directly down into the bomb bay. Two dozen wires would feed from these heavy cables and be attached directly to the casing of the bomb itself. There was only one man who understood the importance of the wires and the panel that would monitor them: Deak Parsons.

On the outside of the plane, Tibbets had put into motion the handiwork of the bomber group’s chief artist, the man charged with adding the distinctive decorations to each one of the planes. Until now, the strike plane was simply known as Number Eighty-two. But Tibbets knew that every plane in the group carried its primary pilot’s distinctive mark, some piece of the man himself, his personality, his background. Tibbets had given that decision of naming the plane a great deal of thought. He recalled Miami, his first flight, the decision to become a pilot, to fly when few around him thought he would survive his first week. The greatest doubt had come from his father, but through all of that, it was his mother who had supported every decision the boy had made, even if it meant putting his life at risk by taking to the air. It was the perfect choice, to thank her, to memorialize her, to dedicate this special plane and its unique mission to the woman who had been his most ardent supporter. Her name was Enola Gay.

T
he word came with little fanfare, the usual matter-of-fact reporting that every senior officer expected. That word was passed from the offices of General LeMay on Guam, directly to Tinian, first to General Tom Farrell, the ranking officer associated with the Manhattan Project, a man who, like Tibbets, answered only to Leslie Groves. The word had been passed quickly through the offices to Tibbets, who read the teletype dispatch with a hard knot tightening inside him. The report was as simple as every report of its kind. The weather over Japan had cleared, and there was minimal cloud cover over all of the three target cities. The time was now. The mission was a
go
.

N
ORTH
T
INIAN
F
IELD
A
UGUST
5, 1945, N
OON

They moved at an agonizing crawl, the trailer rolling down into the specially dug pit. It had been a requirement from the first time Tibbets had seen the size of the bomb, that a hole had to be dug, the bomb placed below the surface of the ground, so that the B-29 could then be rolled over the top of it. There was simply no other way to load the massive bomb into the plane’s bomb bay. Inside the bomb bay, the shackles that held a typical bomb load were long gone, replaced by a massive steel hook. He watched, moving closer as the bomb was rolled down into the pit. Only then, with
the bomb hidden from any distant eyes, was the tarpaulin on the trailer removed. Tibbets stood close beside the pit, stared at the amazing sight, four tailfins encased in a thin steel box, attached at the rear of a massive gun-metal gray trunk, ten feet long, more than two feet wide. The bomb weighed nearly nine thousand pounds, far larger than any single weapon ever dropped by an airplane.

With the bomb now in place in the pit, the
Enola Gay
was towed over the hole, precisely in place, and immediately the technicians were at work, chaining the bomb to the hook in the bomb bay, the crew working in rhythm to raise the bomb slowly upward, until it disappeared into the great plane. Tibbets watched it all, felt frozen to the spot, numbers still running through his head, all of those specifics given him by Oppenheimer, the others. There had been a great deal of talk about just what this weapon would do, and Tibbets had heard often that the bomb carried the punch of twenty thousand tons of TNT. He marveled at that still, though the impact of just what that meant was no more than a fog. There was one piece of the math he could relate to, that this bomb was the equivalent of two hundred thousand of the bombs he had dropped over Europe and North Africa. But the numbers were just exercises now, dancing around the brains of the physicists. Tibbets brought himself back to the moment, watched as the bomb disappeared upward, the bomb bay doors closing, the
Enola Gay
just one more aircraft in a vast field of hundreds more. The plane’s mechanics were there, the specially picked men, seeing to the last details of the loading, the men who already knew the plane’s every screw. As soon as the bomb bay doors were closed, one more man came forward. He had given barely a nod to Tibbets, had boarded the plane holding a hard stare that told anyone around him to leave him be. Tibbets complied, knew that Deak Parsons was headed straight for the inside of the bomb bay, and in short minutes would begin practicing the arming of the cannon inside the bomb, a job that no one had ever attempted. Tibbets still watched the plane, the tractor’s empty trailer now up and out of the pit, most of the men moving off to tackle another task, seeing to the other planes in the group. But Tibbets stayed put, bathed in the warmth and the urgent silence, knew that inside the bomb bay the heat would be stifling, getting worse by the minute, and that a sweating Parsons would suffer for it, cutting and nicking fingers, drawing blood and cursing as he probed and twisted and clamped wires together, inserting the dummy canisters into the cylinder until they were perfectly situated. Then Parsons would
pull the canisters out, disconnect the wiring, and do it all again. He would keep up the practice until there was no time left. Tibbets glanced at his watch, a little after noon. You’ve got a couple hours, Deak. Then I need you.

He turned toward the Quonset huts, saw the guards, knew there would be more, MPs mostly, and others, some of them civilians. Not all the security for the project had been military, guards watching guards. There were more civilians there as well. Scientists had been arriving for the past couple of days, sent by Dr. Oppenheimer to see the bomb’s final journey for themselves. More than one of those men came with a cloak of arrogance that he would actually take the ride, see the bomb’s delivery for himself. But Tibbets knew better. Even on Tinian there were any number of men who had the authority to order themselves aboard any bomber at any time. But not this time. The crew was his, and the
passengers
were limited to just two, Parsons and his one assistant, the men who had one very specific job to do.